So, are you interested in submitting a story to a new anthology? And will it be extraordinarily exciting, devilishly clever, cunningly mysterious, and have Sherlock Holmes teaming up with one or more occult detectives? Then read on, for today we have the serious details on pitches, pay and plans. And supernatural fiction historian (and writer) Tim Prasil calls by to suggest a few characters.

As we said in our last article, John Linwood Grant is editing the Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives anthology for Belanger Books. JLG is the author of both Holmes stories and occult detective stories – even the two at once occasionally, as part of his ‘Tales of the Last Edwardian’ series. And as a harassed writer, he also knows that what you really want to hear right now is How Long, How Much, and When. Let’s get those out of the way before we explain exactly what’s required.

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Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives

Belanger Books

Core concept: A 5,000 – 10,000 word traditional Sherlock Holmes and occult detective “team up” story.

Payment: Authors shall receive a payment of $50 plus a percentage of the Kickstarter project profits (expected minimum payment of $100), and a paperback copy of the anthology.

Rights: Authors shall retain rights to their work. We only retain the rights to the story within the publication.

Pitch Deadline: March 15, 2019

Submission Deadline: July 15, 2019

Note: Kickstarter will run in November 2019 and publication of book will occur in December 2019.

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What We Want

This bit is detailed, not because it’s a terribly complex idea, but because it all increases the chances of us taking your story. And it has a few hints. The more in tune with us you are, the more we’ll wag our tails when we read your submission. If you’re confident that you’ve already grasped the concept, or you’re an experienced writer, you might decide to use it just to double-check. We’d still prefer you read it through.

We want stories which have all the following – four straightforward key elements:

1. Sherlock Holmes (and/or Watson) as a key protagonist; a proper, authentic Conan Doyle-type Holmes, in full character.
2. One or more occult detectives, as the other key protagonist(s), ones who could have taken up a case at the same time as Holmes was alive and functioning. This means Public Domain figures from around 1875 – 1925* OR your own original character operating in the same time period. These are also encouraged.
   
3. A strong supernatural, paranormal, occult, psychic or other ab-natural element which is crucial to the story. As mentioned last time, you CAN try a ‘debunking’ tale, where a mundane explanation ensues, but we won’t take many of those.
4. An actual case/investigation – not Holmes and Carnacki happening to see a ghost pass by, whilst they argue about camera techniques over coffee.

We do not want time-travel stories or steampunk – or Lovecraftiana, unless the latter is very clever, subtle and original, in which case we might have a glance. Think Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, Arthur Machen, L T Meade and so on. Late Victorian, Edwardian and Twenties scariness.

* Do check the occult detective is in the Public Domain. Seventy years after the author’s death is the usual rule-of-thumb, except for some important characters where an Estate is still active and protecting its copyrights. Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, for example.

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The Pitch

It’s possible to do this sort of thing and end up with blocks of similar stories, however well written they are. Seventeen cases where Holmes and Dr Hesselius prove that the apparition at Gruntling Hall was in fact the butler in a sheet (but that the family was genuinely cursed anyway, because a wicked ancestor ate cheese too late at night). Or ten cases of werewolves, phosphorescent pain and missing boots.

For this anthology, we would like short pitches – say a hundred to two hundred words or so (the paragraph above is seventy words, as an example) – telling us about your planned story:

1. The decade and general physical setting(s), e.g. London; a decaying Cornish farmhouse, before WWI; a fancy hotel in Paris.
2. The sort of supernatural threat/mystery, e.g. classic ghostly appearances; physical monstrosity on the loose; madman possessed by something; cursed item. Get us intrigued.
3. The occult detective(s) involved, e.g. Van Helsing late in his career; John Bell having decided spirits do exist; Carnacki at his wits end and needing a co-conspirator.
4. A hint of plot, to show you have a story broadly in mind.

If you’ve never pitched before, have a go at it, and we’ll tell you if you have something there which we think is worth pursuing. If you’ve done it before, you know the drill.

The authors of the pitches we like will be invited to write up a full submission for possible inclusion, so you’ll then have a further three months. No guarantees, but it means that you’re at least on the right lines, so your chances go up.

PITCHES ONLY TO occultholmes@virginmedia.com BY 15TH MARCH, PLEASE

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The Occult Detectives (aka The Doomed Meddlers)

No, they’re not always doomed, we just like the term. They risk their lives, their sanity or their bank balances in the investigation of the dark and mysterious. Holmes you should already know, but what about the characters he will work with here? You have a wide range of possibilities open to you, and yes, we may well take more than one team-up with the same occult detectives (from different authors), if the stories are that good.

We hand over for a moment to Tim Prasil, a keen anthologist of early supernatural stories and the creator of Vera van Slyke, his own dauntless investigator…

Prasil on Paranormal Protagonists

Some fictional occult detectives contemporary with Sherlock Holmes are well-recognized: William Hope Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki and Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence lead the team with Arthur Machen’s Dyson and Richard Marsh’s Augustus Champnell close behind. However, there are lesser known characters who, were they to cross paths with Holmes, might result in an interesting adventure. Were one to ask me to name my Top Five Lesser-Known Occult Detectives Contemporary with Sherlock Holmes, I would gladly name them—even if the one asking had a chronic infatuation with a dog-deer crossbreed known as “lurchers.”

1. We start with the hazy and unnamed investigator in H.G. Wells’ “The Red Room” (1896). What brought him to Lorraine Castle to investigate its fearful Red Room? What is his relationship to the young Duke, the unfortunate fellow who “had begun his dying” after merely opening the door to the Red Room? We know Wells’ protagonist arrives as a skeptic (as do others on my list), so how does his experience change him?
2. While we’re on the subject of potentially converted skeptics, let’s consider Lady Julie Spinner, a promising character in a disappointing novella by an anonymous author. The piece is titled “Wanted—An Explanation” (1881), wherein Lady Julie says, “I have been a hunter of ghosts all my life, and have never been able even to meet with a single person who has seen one.” However, after being stymied by the strange events at Hunt House, does her view of the boundaries of reality expand?
3. From Lady Spinner, we move to Lord Syfret. The adventures of this serial character might be a bit tough to locate, but Arabella Kenealy’s series of short stories titled Some of Lord Syfret’s Experiences has been reprinted by Coachwhip Press. That is, seven of them appear in that reprint, and one source reports that eleven tales appeared in Ludgate magazine in 1896 and 1897. Here’s a borderline occult detective that’s awaiting a full resurrection by a literary detective, if not a creative writer.
4. Enough with the nobility—let’s look at a duo that beat Mulder and Scully by roughly a century. Miss Erristoun and Mr. Calder-Maxwell investigate the title room in Lettice Galbraith’s “The Blue Room” (1897). The story is remarkably Victorian in that Miss Erristoun is reduced from a gutsy rebel to a wilting maiden-in-distress (one who marries the man she earlier waved off as wanting to tame her). But what if that marriage crumbled quickly, and she rejoined the scholarly Calder-Maxwell to investigate other cases of ghosts-that-aren’t-really-ghosts-at-all?
5. I end with what would amount to a crossover of Arthur Conan Doyle and Arthur Conan Doyle. Dr. Hardacre, in ACD’s “The Brown Hand” (1899), is a doctor whose hobby is psychical research and who, upon solving his rich uncle’s otherworldly problem, winds up in a very nice position to make probing occult mysteries his full-time job. No doubt, he and Dr. Watson might have a jolly time debating diagnoses: demon possession or delirium tremens—lycanthropy or laryngitis?

Links to all of these stories—except the mildly elusive Lord Syfret ones—can be found on either the Chronological Bibliography of Early Occult Detectives or the Legacy of Ghost Hunter Fiction bibliographies at my Brom Bones Books website.

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We have our own set of perhaps lesser known potential characters, such as:

• Gerald Canevin, of Henry S Whitehead’s Caribbean tales;
• Alice & Claude Askew’s Aylmer Vance
• The young woman of Ella Scrymsour’s stories – Shiela Crerar, Psychic Investigator;
• John Bell, the confirmed and determined sceptic of L T Meade & Robert Eustace**;
• Dr. Martin Hesselius created by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu;
• Flaxman Low, from the pen of ‘E & H Heron’.

** L T Meade & Robert Eustace also wrote three tales of a palmist, Diana Marburg.

And the pages of the magazine Occult Detective Quarterly might provide more general inspiration – there are great period tales therein of Aaron Vlek’s Geoffrey Vermillion (ODQ #4), Amanda DeWees’ Sybil Ingram (#1 & ODQ Presents), Joshua M Reynolds’ Charles St.Cyprian (# 1 & #4), Melanie Atheron Allen’s Simon Wake (#3), Aaron Smith’s Miss Mason (#3) and more. You can’t nick their characters, though.

NOTE: Ace storyteller Willie Meikle, who has chronicled Carnacki’s further adventures at length, even provided a supernatural Holmes story, ‘The Ghost Shirt’, in ODQ#3, and Brandon Barrows wrote a tale of Carnacki in his earlier years, ‘The Arcana of the Alleys’, for #2 .

Please note that we don’t want lots of laboured and archaic speech, or an excess of Cockney chimney-sweeps and ridiculously posh-talking nobility. Moderate and appropriate use of contractions and period slang, cant and vernacular, please.

A Note on Inclusivity and Discrimination

It was perfectly possible in late Victorian, Edwardian and 1920s Britain to be active and respected whilst being a feminist, being black, being gay or being restricted in physical ability (as just a few examples). Don’t limit the scope of your characters’ personal nature, situation or views. Whilst limited situational discrimination may occasionally be relevant in context of the period – in order to reflect characters’ life histories or traumas – sexism, racism etc. in general will not be accepted.

REPEAT REMINDER: PITCHES ONLY TO occultholmes@virginmedia.com BY 15TH MARCH, PLEASE.

General queries on the anthology for JLG (but NOT full submissions) can be sent to the same email address.

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More news of other Belanger Books opportunities, strange fiction, supernatural stuff, and goodness knows what in a couple of days…

or ‘Ghosts May Apply’. Interested in flexing your fountain pen, dear listener? Today we give you some initial guidelines for submitting short stories to a brand new anthology, to be edited by John Linwood Grant, old greydog himself, and coming from Belanger Books, as part of their exciting ‘Great Detective Universe’ project. But you need some background first, for this anthology is no random, unplanned outing for sudden cold drafts and occult apparitions in the night…

Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives will be about detection, logic and technique, and will concern an authentic Sherlock Holmes, but with one simple twist. It will include a Holmes who was aware of potentially supernatural elements in the wider world, and as with ‘The Giant Rat of Sumatra’, felt the world was not ready for such knowledge. He preferred to leave the field of the ab-natural to others, but on occasion had recourse to work with some of those worthies, and was drawn beyond his usual world. Dr Watson was never allowed to include any such references when he wrote up his friend’s cases, but now these instances can be brought into the light.

Does this ruin the core of Holmes’ position? Not exactly, so don’t run off in a canonical panic. Do you remember ‘The Sussex Vampire’? That particular Conan Doyle story contains the famous lines, where Holmes tells Watson:

“This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.”

But as we have oft said before, Holmes’ most quoted comments on the supernatural are not quite as definitive as some think. In ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’, what he actually states is that normal investigative techniques and logical deduction would be of no use in supernatural cases.

“If Dr. Mortimer’s surmise should be correct, and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.”

In a sense, we might say that Holmes’ fear was that none of his peculiar intellectual talents could be of value in a situation where normal logic was overthrown. If there were such cases, genuine ones, who did deal with them? More foolish, credulous or cash-hungry consulting detectives perhaps. Fraudulent psychics, mayhap. And here and there, the genuine occult detectives, those who had developed a different blend of investigative skills and a knowledge of matters apparently ‘outside the ordinary laws of Nature’…

Not so long ago, the ever-active Sherlockian writer and scholar David Marcum edited The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories – Part VII: Eliminate the Impossible (MX Publishing), a grand idea which featured tales of Holmes’s encounters with seemingly impossible events – ghosts and hauntings, curses and mythical beasts, and more. Except… every case had to have a mundane explanation of some sort.

For a classic example of this approach, you could also turn to L T Meade and Robert Eustace, whose 1898 collection A Master of Mysteries contains a series of investigations into apparently supernatural events which have other explanations –

“To explain, by the application of science, phenomena attributed to spiritual agencies has been the work of my life.”

John Bell, in A Master of Mysteries

John Linwood Grant contributed ‘The Second Life of Jabez Salt’ to Eliminate the Impossible, with a slight additional conceit contained therein, the hint of another well-known detective:

“If,” he said at last, “You are convinced that this is a supernatural affair, then I can be of no use to you, Mrs Salt. I neither give credence to such things, nor do I investigate them.”

She sighed.

“I understand. Mr Carnacki said that you might not help.”

Holmes looked up sharply. “Carnacki? You have been to see him?”

“I have corresponded with him. He is presently otherwise engaged, and ventured that I might seek you out. ‘A sharper mind than mine,’ he said, ‘And one which might better discern if this is merely man’s devilry. He is a proud chap, though, averse to matters ab-natural, and may not help.’ After his latest letter, I took his advice and came down to beg assistance from that ‘sharper mind’.”

My friend’s face was a mixture of pleasure and disdain.

“Well, Holmes?” I prompted.

Of all the supernaturalists in London, Holmes had most time for young Thomas Carnacki, whose scientific methodologies had already proved a number of hauntings to be mere trickery. Holmes applauded the young man’s application of science and logic, and yet abhorred Carnacki’s conviction that the supernatural might still be in play at times. Knowingly or not, Mrs Salt had placed my friend in a dilemma. A certain degree of pride was at stake.

Carnacki (the Ghost Finder) being, of course, the occult detective created by William Hope Hodgson in Edwardian times. Crucially, anyone who has read Hope Hodgson will remember that about half Carnacki’s cases were proved in the end, by the use of investigative methods and equipment, to be quite mundane after all (although one was both natural and supernatural, just to up the stakes).

And JLG’s short novel A Study in Grey (18thWall productions), falls within the same universe, where a canonical Holmes joins forces with military intelligence expert Captain Redvers Blake. Here, the tale can be read as one of spies and dire deeds in Edwardian Britain, and/or as a possible occurrence of ab-natural influences. You’re free to choose and interpret events, as Holmes does in the tale (you don’t need to guess – the Great Detective chooses to take the non-supernatural approach, and stays within Conan Doyle’s boundaries).

Team Occult

What has this to do with the price of fish? Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives will be an anthology of new stories exploring some of the above points, but with free rein for those who wish to go completely supernatural whilst retaining some investigative element and rigour. We expect the preponderance of tales to have genuine psychic, paranormal or ab-natural aspects, but a well written ‘debunking’ might also sneak in.

Belanger Books and greydog will be looking for adventures which involve Holmes teaming up with an occult detective such as Carnacki, John Silence, or Professor Van Helsing. There are plenty of “public domain” occult or supernatural detectives to choose from, or you may already have your own. In our next article, in couple of days, we’ll even suggest some possible team-ups – and point out (this is Women in Horror Month, after all), that female protagonists are indeed encouraged. We have a few existing, period examples of women investigators you could use, but we know that a number of contemporary writers have created fine characters who might well fit.

The submitted stories, which will be in the range five to ten thousand words, must draw directly on the canonical Sherlock Holmes, not the BBC version of the character on Sherlock. For example, Watson should address Sherlock Holmes as “Holmes” not “Sherlock”. Go back to the original Conan Doyle, not TV or film adaptations. And no, we’re not after time-travelling Holmes, space Holmes, steampunk Holmes or any of those variants. Holmes and Watson (assuming you include the latter) must be the real thing.

The stories should also fit the time period for any public domain characters as well. Your detective story should make sense for the timeline of your characters, i.e. you shouldn’t have a Dupin/ Holmes story take place in 1930 as Dupin would be dead and Holmes getting on a bit (it is generally accepted that Holmes lived from 1854-1957* and that Watson lived from 1852 – 1929).

We imagine most tales will be set from the mid-1870s to perhaps as late as the early 1930s, though remember you have a Holmes in his seventies if you choose the latter.

*William Baring-Gould reckoned that, anyway.

The anthology will filled through a blend of encouraging words to some authors who already write in the area, and through open submissions. So anyone can have a shot, but they’ll have to make it good.

In Part Two, we’ll discuss some aspects in more detail, talk about how to pitch – we’d like brief pitches first, to help shape the book – and give you more formal detail on tone, word length, timescale and remuneration (yes, it’s a paying gig). We’ll also tell you about other Belanger Books submission opportunities which have arisen.

In the meantime, do crank up your thinking machine, dig out your mouldering research, and so forth. If you want to read more on this site, you can simply type Holmes into the Searchbox on greydogtales, or look at our range of articles on Carnacki and other occult detectives. A couple of relevant examples:

http://greydogtales.com/blog/shades-of-sherlock-holmes-pastiche-paranormal-or-piffle/

http://greydogtales.com/blog/carnacki-the-second-great-detective/

and

Casting the Prunes: Flaxman Low Triumphant!

The magazine Occult Detective Quarterly regularly contains a period story of supernatural investigation (or more than one), to add to your exposure.

And there’s an external piece by author James Lovegrove which covers some relevant Holmesian ground and crossovers here:

https://crimereads.com/sherlock-holmes-versus-the-supernatural/

NOTE: We mentioned not wanting steampunk this time, but you might like to know that this aspect has been covered by Belanger Books’ most recent outing on the Holmesian front, Sherlock Holmes: Adventures in the Realms of Steampunk, due out this Spring (2019).

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If you want to be sure to read Part Two, you can either make a note to pop back here later this week, or subscribe to greydogtales.com for free via a little box in the top left corner somewhere. We are here for the pleasure, and tragically non-profitmaking, so it’s not one of those sites where you get bugged by strangers. Except us. But we’re not strangers – we’re nice.

As our current feature month drifts to its close, dear listener, we have perhaps our most detailed interview yet, and with a speculative fiction author new to us, Mike Brooks. Another Britlander, no less. There’s some thought-provoking stuff below, on writing, Warhammer, queer fiction and all sorts, so join us and see what Mike has to say…

“If you’re a fan of TV shows about wayward starship crews taking on whatever job will keep them flying, you might be suffering though a dry spell right now, since shows like Firefly, Farscape, and Dark Matter are no longer running. But Mike Brooks’ Keiko novels could help fill the gap. They’re an addictive dive into a fantastic universe populated by an intriguing cast of characters, who are making their way through a future in which humanity has spread across the galaxy.”

theverge.com

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Mike Brooks

Mike Brooks was born in Ipswich, Suffolk and moved to Nottingham when he was 18 to go to university. He’s stayed there ever since, and now lives with his wife, cats, snakes, and a collection of tropical fish. He is the author, amongst other works, of the Keiko novels, sci-fi adventures that follow the escapades of those crewing the spaceship of the same name: DARK RUN, DARK SKY and DARK DEEDS.

greydog: Hi, and welcome to greydogtales. Obviously we’re going to ask about LGBTQ+ writers and characters in strange fiction, but maybe first you could tell the readers a bit about yourself, to set the scene. And if you wanted to share your personal identity in the context of this feature, how would you do so?

Mike: My name’s Mike Brooks, and I’m an author who lives in Nottingham, in England. I’m the author of the Keiko series of ‘grimy space-opera’ novels, and I write freelance for Games Workshop’s Black Library. I’m disabled (partial hearing loss), and queer. While there are certainly advantages and a sense of community to be gained from more specific labels, and I’ve used ‘bisexual’ and ‘bi+’ in the past (and still will, depending on the company I’m in), I like the term ‘queer’ as a convenient catch-all. Besides, I’ve come to the conclusion that things like sexuality and gender are individual: a straight man could walk into a bar with a genderqueer bisexual and he could agree more with them on who in there was attractive than he might with another straight man!

greydog: How do you describe the bulk of your own work – horror, weird fiction, magical realism, speculative, or what? Would you find ‘horror’ an uncomfortable or inappropriate label?

Mike: I’m very much a science-fiction author in terms of my published work, although I write fantasy as well, and a fantasy novel is my next big project that I’m hoping to sell. I’m definitely not a horror writer, although one or two of my early urban fantasy short stories were a bit gruesome: but I think they lacked the essential sense of horror, in that the protagonist wasn’t powerless or near-powerless against the threat.

greydog: And what’s your preferred format and length as a writer – flash fiction, short story, novella, novel, or even book series?

Mike: I’ve done all of them except flash fiction, but I think I’m most comfortable with a book series as it really gives a story time to grow and characters to develop. That said, I’ve recently had a novella (Wanted: Dead) come out for Black Library, and it was a nice change of pace to write 30,000 words and then leave the characters where they were after a small, self-contained story.

greydog: Were there key books and films that influenced and helped you develop as a creator? Did they include LGBTQ+ works and/or characters – and if not, did this bug you?

Mike: Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy was a big influence on how I’d like to write fantasy, as were Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles in terms of having a setting where the lines were blurred between magic and superstition. Firefly was a huge influence on the Keiko series, as was the general aesthetic of Blade Runner and indeed Games Workshop’s Necromunda game (the first one, from the mid-90s, although I enthusiastically play and indeed write fiction about the new version too). But as for LGBTQ+ characters… not really.

Although that said, Willow in Buffy The Vampire Slayer was a prominent queer character, even if her presentation and description kind of flipped from “straight” to “lesbian” without any real acknowledgement of even the possibility of bisexuality. But I suppose as a child I didn’t think about it, and as a young adult it didn’t surprise me – I grew up when Section 28 was in force, and British schools weren’t allowed to provide any positive instances of homosexuality, or basically anything other than cisgender heteronormativity. I was used to these things Not Being Talked About, and I guess for a while I didn’t consider that perhaps creators could or should.

greydog: How did you discover authors who wrote about characters whose identities/positions you could relate to? By accident, word of mouth, or actively hunting their work down on your own?

Mike: I’ve never really gone looking for queer fiction. I almost exclusively gravitate towards speculative fiction, and I vastly prefer that which includes characters who have various sexualities and genders, but the two groups don’t really cross – ‘queer fiction’ is about being queer, and speculative fiction is about the speculative nature of the world it takes place in, which generally involves something that threatens the entire world. I almost exclusively read novels, and you don’t tend to get stories about two dragon riders quietly exploring their sexuality while the world fails to be threatened by a resurrected god, or what have you. As a result, it’s tended to be either by accident or, on some occasions (and more often recently), word of mouth – K Arsenault Rivera’s The Tiger’s Daughter is a wonderful book, and a rare example of fantasy which is also very definitely queer fiction, because it’s an f/f romance told in flashback against the backdrop of a threatened demonic invasion.

greydog: Being realistic, there are times when many of us compromise, and times when we lose our cool. Have you ever dialled down the queer aspects of a piece to try and draw in a wider audience? Or dialled it up on purpose, to hammer a point home?

Mike: I played it very straight (literally) with my first published novel, Dark Run, mainly because at that time I wasn’t sure how my publishers would react to queer characters… and also because the novel is a fast-paced thriller, and the characters were more concentrating on staying alive than on the finer points of sex and romance. My idea was that once I’d found my footing a bit, and got a better handle on who I was working with, I’d start including more LGBTQ+ elements, which I did.

In contrast, my Black Library novella Wanted: Dead features their first-ever openly acknowledged lesbian relationship (to my knowledge), and that was an entirely deliberate choice on my part. The main characters come from a House which (for reasons of largely-unexplained genetics, that I didn’t come up with) is about 98% female, and as it’s a Necromunda story it’s about gangs and gang conflict in an enormous city rather than actual war on a battlefield, like most Black Library fiction. I wanted to give some sense of the personal lives of the characters, to show what it was they were fighting for, and I could see absolutely no reason why characters from a House that is 98% female, and which generally despises men, would do anything other than hook up with another woman if they had any sort of sexual interest at all in that direction. So Jarene, the main character, not only has to consider the welfare of her fellow gang members during the story, but also deal with the fact that one of them is also her girlfriend (and a bit reckless), which provides an extra twist of fear and alarm for her any time something dangerous happens.

greydog: Have you ever had negative reader reactions because of those factors, to your knowledge?

Mike: Only from older relatives who’ve decided to read my stuff. At least, that I know of: there’s a fairly small (I hope) but vocal part of Games Workshop’s fandom who seem to object to representation of anyone who isn’t straight white men, so I imagine any of them who’ve read Wanted: Dead are going to have an aneurism, but none of them have contacted me about it and I haven’t gone looking for reviews of it.

greydog: What’s the most heartening response you’ve ever had to portraying/including LGBTQ+ characters?

Mike: I try not to read my GoodReads reviews, but there was one person who expressed delight that I’d included a couple of gender-neutral characters with gender-neutral pronouns in Dark Deeds (the third Keiko book), because it meant they’d got to see someone like them in science-fiction. To be honest, if even one person has seen a character I’ve written and gone “Oh my God, that’s me, I’ve never seen myself in this genre before”, that’s good enough for me.

greydog: We were at a panel during the 2018 UK Fantasycon, which included discussion of asexuality in fiction as part of the diversity spectrum. Have you ever covered characters who specifically identified as asexual?

Mike: Tamara Rourke in the Keiko series is asexual. She doesn’t actually use that term – I’ve tried to avoid using 21st Century terminology about such things, since it’s set about five hundred years in the future and, while the galaxy is far from perfect, I wanted to give an impression than anything anyone does in that respect is so unremarkable to them that nothing needs its own term – but she specifically states that she’s tried sex once or twice out of curiosity and really didn’t see the appeal of it on its own merits. It’s not that she never would, but she doesn’t have any desire to do it for herself, and that is I believe pretty much the definition.

greydog: Which piece of your own work are you most proud of, and why?

Mike: That’s almost impossible to answer! Dark Run was the novel that got me published, on both sides of the Atlantic and in two, soon to be three languages, so that’s a huge reason to be proud. Dark Sky got a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, but then so did Dark Deeds, which I think had the plot I was most proud of from the three of them, and also where I introduced a couple of genderqueer characters as well as making a couple of characters’ non-hetero sexualities more overt. But then I’m proud of Wanted: Dead because it features the first openly-acknowledged queer main character in all of Games Workshop’s fiction. And I’m already proud of the stuff that I’m currently working on. Essentially I’m just proud that I’ve got stuff published, for money, and that people read them and seem (in the main) to enjoy them!

LGBTQ+ AND THE FIELD

greydog: The most common phrase you hear when people object to active movements which encourage diversity in fiction is “I don’t care about the sexuality, gender, colour, etc. of the writer. I only care about good stories”. How would you respond to that?

Mike: It’s a fine phrase in and of itself. The problem is that it’s usually uttered by people who almost only read straight white male authors, and use the line as a defence for why they don’t read stories by anyone else. It’s also generally followed with something about how ‘women can’t write good battles’, or not wanting to read about stories that are just about queer politics or racial politics, and so it turns out that they do care about the sexuality, gender or colour of the writer, because they think it has a direct correlation to whether a story is good.

greydog: For fantasy/speculative readers especially, world-building allows for any take you want on individuals and societies. Nowadays that includes gender identities and sexual identities more than it used to. Do you have any examples of books you’ve read where you felt that LGBTQ+ characters were handled well?

Mike: Again, The Tiger’s Daughter by K Arsenault Rivera was a great example of having two lesbian main characters, and even having the story being about that (it’s a fantastical romance, essentially?), without that being the sole focus (there are also demons). Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie was a really interesting look at a society where everyone uses ‘she/her’ pronouns and so things like sexuality and gender identity essentially disappear.

greydog: Are many readers basically scared of directly queer fiction (which would be ironic in the horrorand speculative fields especially)? Or do you thing that they just don’t come across enough good examples to get into it?

Mike: Why would readers as a group be scared of directly queer fiction? A fair percentage of them are queer themselves. Unless you’re presenting ‘readers’ as a heteronormative group, and ‘queer readers’ as a distinct group who aren’t simply ‘readers’, which isn’t exactly helpful for this narrative.

Even with that said, I think we need to be very careful what we term as ‘good’ examples of queer fiction. It is certainly possible for a non-queer person to write bad queer fiction in that they’re not good at representing queer people. It’s also certainly possible for a queer person to write an excellent presentation of queer characters that comes straight from their own lived experience, but be crap at writing a story, or dialogue, or what have you. The issue is that queer writers (or writers of colour, or women for that matter) will be held to higher standards than straight, white, male authors. There’s plenty of absolute trash (subjective opinions only, of course) that’s been written by straight people featuring straight characters doing straight things, and published, yet no one’s talking about readers being scared of ‘directly straight fiction’ because they happen to have encountered an Alan Titchmarsh sex scene.

greydog: True. The heteronormative point is a good one. Anyway, ‘straight’ is a silly term in many ways, but we’ll use it for shorthand. A number of straight creators utilise LGBTQ+ characters in their work. Do you see any inherent problems with this, or is it a good way of getting audiences to broaden their minds and reading scope. Are there any common misconceptions which get transmitted by straight creators?

Mike: No problems at all, so long as the voices of straight creators writing queer characters aren’t promoted over those of queer creators writing queer characters. Just like men writing women shouldn’t be promoted over women writing women, or white people writing characters of colour shouldn’t be promoted over creators of colour writing characters of colour. And all these creators, when writing characters from a different demographic (particularly if that’s a demographic with less privilege than their own) should be doing research and getting feedback to ensure that they’re not perpetuating damaging stereotypes or inaccuracies.

There are all sorts of common misconceptions which can and have been transmitted by straight creators, too many to list, but it would be unfair to say that all straight creators do them, or indeed that the misconceptions are universally misconceptions: it’s perhaps better to say that things which might be true about certain queer individuals are taken as true for most or all, and presented as their primary characteristics.

greydog: Are such niche fields as gay and lesbian dark erotica, and the more explicit side of paranormal romance, useful for advancing the presence of LGBTQ+ writers and characters, or detrimental to a balanced portrayal?

Mike: It’s detrimental if that’s the only avenue in which LGBTQ+ writers are allowed to write, or in which those characters are allowed to be seen. If those writers and characters are represented fairly and equally across all other forms of fiction then it would be unbalanced for them not to be present in dark erotica. If they’re not present fairly and equally across all other forms of fiction (and let’s be honest, we’re not), then questioning whether their presence in dark erotica is detrimental to a balanced portrayal, as opposed to attempting to increase their visibility elsewhere, is merely an attempt to further suppress their presence.

greydog: Do you think LGBTQ+ fiction is more acceptable to the broad public when it comes from ‘nice middle- class white people’ than when it comes from additionally marginalised groups such as queer black writers?

Mike: Yes.

greydog: Getting work noticed at all is one of the hardest things for a writer to achieve. Do you think there are more barriers for LGBTQ+ writers in general?

Mike: That’s a huge question, and probably not one that can be easily answered. There are certainly some publishers or websites who refuse to accept LGBTQ+ positive works, but they’d tend to be fairly small. The big names will publish pretty much anything if it’ll get them money, queer fiction included (I’m with an imprint of Simon & Schuster in the US; another imprint of theirs publishes books by people like Rush Limbaugh, or glowing biopics of Trump, and they were going to be publishing Milo’s book until he talked about having sex with teenage boys – it’s fair to say S&S don’t have a single guiding compass, whatever the individual opinions of individual editors might be).

But you have look beyond that, at other factors. It’s documented that bisexual people are more likely to experience mental ill health than either gay or straight people. Trans people pre-transition (those who would like to transition, that is) have a much higher rate of suicidal ideation than either cis people, or trans people post-transition. The myth of the tragic artist aside, these things are likely to have an impact on someone’s ability to create, and that’s just two factors which are related to queer identities but have nothing whatsoever to do with reception within the field, just on the potential ability to get something out there in the first place. But you can’t ignore intersectionality: a middle-class gay white man may still have less barriers to overcome than a working class straight black woman.

greydog: We’d wonder if perhaps it’s not always the basic creativity which is so much of a challenge for many writers with mental and/or physical health issues, more the constant networking, and representation on social media and  formal platforms, which seems to be demanded nowadays. Those activities are draining enough in their own right. We did read the 2017 Mereish report,  which suggested that in the case of bisexuals and mental health, many problems might be caused  primarily by a lack of ‘community’, as opposed to the presence of active lesbian and gay communities in many areas. From the industry side, how should the big publishers and larger independents be fostering LGBTQ+ fiction and portrayals? Or is it purely up to readers to express a demand?

Mike: It’s a chicken-and-egg scenario. With the best will in the world, I understand that publishing is based on numbers, and risks have to be calculated. Going large on a market for which there isn’t a definite demand is courting failure. But by the same token, readers can’t buy things that don’t exist to express a demand (and publishers can only take so much account of what people say they want, they have to be led with what people actually buy).

However, I think there should be a standard question for large publishers and independents to be asking about any and all fiction, which is “where are the queer people?”. And if there aren’t any, or there’s only a token, badly-represented presence, and there’s no reason for this (there may be a justifiable reason for it, in that there might be a justifiable reason why there aren’t any women, or aren’t any people of colour, but it needs to be a good reason rather than just “Well, I didn’t think of that/didn’t want to include any”) then the story gets declined, or bounced back until it’s brought up to standard.

greydog: There are a number of presses dedicated to LGBTQ+ fiction. Do you view these as a good thing, or do you think they risk perpetuating exclusion from mainstream presses?

Mike: I think they can only be a good thing. They can provide an environment where queer authors can be certain of not being rejected because of their queer identity, which can allow them to build confidence to then try to approach more mainstream publishing. And it might be that a story really wouldn’t have the mass-market appeal for a big publisher to pick it up, but it might be viable for a smaller press with a small but invested audience, and that’s good for everyone involved. And rest assured, if a big publisher sees the potential for money, then they’ll jump – you need only look at the fact that Fifty Shades Of Grey and The Martian were picked up from being self-published, so already out there and available, but still bumped up into global successes.

greydog: Is there anything else you’d like to say about the topic that we haven’t managed to cover?

Mike: I’d like to see less conversation about “should LGBTQ+ authors be [doing thing]”, when no one’s asking if straight authors should be doing it. It feeds into the idea that queer authors must always be shining beacons of positive representation for the entire demographic, while straight authors can do as they please and it only reflects on them personally, if it even does that.

greydog: Yes, that’s a difficult area  – and we’ve heard the same comments from author friends who are black, who get asked things you wouldn’t ask a white writer. The pressure to be a role model, to get everything right, and all those related factors. So, finally, what have you planned in the way of work for 2019?

Mike: I’m currently editing my own fantasy novel, which directly addresses issues around patriarchy and sexuality through culture clash, and has a culture with five different genders. I also have my debut novel for Games Workshop’s Black Library coming out, which I believe is scheduled for late in the year.

greydog: We’ll look forward to seeing the novel, and many thanks for taking part. It’s been fascinating.

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You can find Mike Brooks’ books on Amazon, and here’s a direct link to the first in the Keiko series mentioned above:

Today we share some sixties cant, and are pleased to introduce you to that most creative chap, Matt Bright. Matt has a fine line in prose, a most deft hand with art and design, and a noted role in producing and supporting strange tales. A fellow Britlander, he also works quite often alongside the excellent Lethe Press, and has done much to encourage imaginative LGBTQ+ fiction.

Continue reading MATT BRIGHT – It’s So Bona to Vada his Eek →